Excerpt from Havana Bay by Martin Cruz Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Or a paladar, a private restaurant. They're small, they're only allowed twelve chairs but the food is much superior. No?"
Perhaps Rufo didn't get a chance to dine out often, but Arkady didn't think he could even watch someone eat.
"No. The major and sergeant were in green uniforms, the detective in gray and blue. Why was that?"
"She's police and they're from the Ministry of the Interior. We just call it Minint. Police are under Minint."
Arkady nodded; in Russia the militia was under the same ministry. "But Arcos and Luna don't usually go out on homicides?"
"I don't think so."
"Why was the captain going on about the Russian embassy?"
"He has a point. In the old days Russians acted like lords. Even now, for Cuban police to ask questions at the embassy takes a diplomatic note. Sometimes the embassy cooperates and sometimes it doesn't."

Most of the traffic was Russian Ladas and Moskviches spraying exhaust and then, waddling as ponderously as dinosaurs, American cars from before the Revolution. Rufo and Arkady got out at a two-story house decorated like a blue Egyptian tomb with scarabs, ankhs and lotuses carved in stucco. A car on blocks sat in residence on the porch.

"'57 Chevrolet." Rufo looked inside at the car's gutted interior, straightened and ran his hand over the flecked paint. From the back. "Tail fins." To the front bumper. "And tits."
From the car key in the bag of effects Arkady knew that Pribluda had a Lada. No breasts on a Russian car.
As they went in and climbed the stairs the door to the ground-floor apartment cracked enough for a woman in a housedress to follow their progress.
"A concierge?" Arkady asked.
"A snoop. Don't worry, at night she watches television and doesn't hear a thing."
"I'm going back tonight."
"That's right." Rufo unlocked the upstairs door. "This is a protocol apartment the embassy uses for visiting dignitaries. Well, lesser dignitaries. I don't think we've had anyone here for a year."
"Is someone from the embassy coming to talk about Pribluda?"
"The only one who wants to talk about Pribluda is you. You like cigars?"
"I've never smoked a cigar."
"We'll talk about it later. I'll be back at midnight to take you to the plane. If you think the flight to Havana was long, wait till you go back to Moscow."

The apartment was furnished with a set of cream-and-gold dining chairs, a sideboard with a coffee service, a nubby sofa, red phone, a bookshelf with titles like La Amistad Russo-Cubana and Fidel y Arte supported by erotic bookends in mahogany. In a disconnected refrigerator a loaf of Bimbo Bread was spotted with mold. The air conditioner was dead and showed the carbon smudges of an electrical fire. Arkady thought he probably showed some carbon smudges of his own.

He stripped from his clothes and showered in a stall of tiles that poured water from every valve and washed the odor of the autopsy off his skin and from his hair. He dried himself on the scrap of towel provided and stretched out on the bed under his overcoat in the dark of the bedroom and listened to the voices and music that filtered from outside through the closed shutters of the window. He dreamed of floating among the playing fish of Havana Bay. He dreamed of flying back to Moscow and not landing, just circling in the night.

Russian planes did that, sometimes, if they were so old that their instruments failed. Although there could be other factors. If a pilot made a second landing approach he could be charged for the extra fuel expended, so he made only one, good or not. Or they were overloaded or underfueled.

He was both.

Circling sounded good.

Excerpted from Havana Bay by Martin Cruz Smith. Copyright© 1999 by Martin Cruz Smith. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.